I think this problem is a little advanced for someone "very new" to Perl. Do you understand the basic data structures of perl (perldoc perldata)? Do you have a fair understanding of regular expressions (perldoc perlretut)? How about references (perldoc perlreftut)? If you have a pretty good grasp of those concepts, you should be able to take a stab at this problem.

Generally, it's recommended that you use a module to parse XML type data files, but a quick and dirty solution might go like this: 

use strict;
use warnings;

my %info;
my $thisuser;

while (<DATA>) {
  my ($var, $val) = /<([^>]+)>([^<]+)/;
  if ($var eq 'UserID') {
    $thisuser = $val;
  }
  else {
    $info{$thisuser}{$var} = $val;
  }
}

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper(\%info), "\n";

__DATA__
<UserID>46786<UserID>
<start>2004-10-21TO09:57:25Z</start>
<dev>Some Text</dev>
<var1>some string</var1>
<var2>some string</var2>
<USerID>57864</UserID>
<start>2004-10-25TO09:57:25Z</start>
<dev>Some Text</dev>
<var1>some string</var1>
<UserID>46786<UserID>
<var3>some string</var3>
<var4>some string</var4>
<UserID>98766</UserID>
<start>2004-10-21TO09:57:25Z</start>
<dev>Some Text</dev>
<var1>some string</var1>
<var2>some string</var2>
<var5>some string</var5>
<var6>some string</var6>
<USerID>57864</UserID>
<var4>some string</var4>
<var6>some string</var6>

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Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.

In reply to Re: getting parts of the strings from a file into managable variables by Roy Johnson
in thread Help:getting parts of the strings from a file into managable variables by my_perl

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